Sunday, September 28, 2008

You've heard me bellyache before about the situation football fans face in the San Francisco bay area. The NFL's rules say that whenever the home team is playing, no other in-market TV station may air any out-of-market games. For us, that is tres suck, because we have two teams. The Sunday morning game is usually the 9ers and the afternoon game is the Raiders, or vice-versa. The only time we get to see potentially 3 games is when either team plays on Thursday, Sunday or Monday night or has the week off.

The good news, at least for us here at chez Sayer, is that next February, they turn off the analog TV stations and we go 100% digital. What does that have to do with anything? Well, KCBA-DT is on (RF) channel 13, and we should be able to get that with our VHF-hi beam pointed to Fremont Peak! We get it today, except that it gets co-channel interference from KOVR-TV in Sacramento. Fortunately for us, since KCBA is in the Salinas/Monterey market and is a Fox affiliate, they're going to air the Cowboys game opposite KPIX's coverage of the Raiders. Now, since the Raiders are playing the Chargers this week, I'll probably watch that game, but if it turns into a laugher, I have somewhere else to go... except for the fact that KCBA probably won't come in today over KOVR. But this at least proves the point that if you can pull in KCBA (or if you could pull in the Fox or CBS affiliates from Walnut Grove), you'll once again get your choice of 3 games.

Of course, if I could pull in KION-DT (the CBS affiliate in Salinas/Monterey), then I'd have a choice potentially of 4 games, but unfortunately KION is UHF, and even if I had a UHF antenna pointed the right way, I probably couldn't pull in a signal good enough for a digital tuner to decode. Oh well.